Here’s to lust in our hearts!
Yeah I was pleasantly surprised by this. I have never particularly been a fan of Penn Jillette, but he went up in my estimation because of this. He’s pretty much the only Libertarian to do what anyone who actually believes in what they claim to believe should do. I.e. recognize that whatever problems you have with the Democrats and their policies, they do not pose a direct existential threat to American liberties, so anyone who cares about liberty should do anything they can to support them.
We have a Libertarian on our city council (where I also serve). He won by 1 vote in his first election because the guys he was running against did zero to campaign, and I think also pissed some people off. We’d hoped he would stop running after 1 term to go on and be a smaller fish in a bigger pond but no. He won his second election by virtue of no one realizing we had an election being that it was an off year so nobody ran against him.
Dude votes no on pretty much everything, because everything we do is related to spending tax money. Mind you, it’s not COLLECTING tax money - we haven’t proposed any levies since he’s been on council. This is just spending the money the residents have agreed to pay. He also never votes yes on passing a budget.
It’s all inconsequential because everything passes, 4-1. So he’s just there for show. Like his “TAXES ARE THEFT” sign he proudly displays in the background of Zoom meetings.
The thing that drives everyone nuts about this guy is that he never. says. a. word. Like, we’ll have our work sessions to discuss agenda items. When I was president, I would make a point of looking him in the eye “does anyone have anything to add?” Nope. Not a peep. No arguments, no counterpoints, no speeches about why he’s going to vote no. He just votes no.
He takes his council pay, though. Occasionally votes yes (one meeting he voted yes on one truck purchase but no on a second truck). Doesn’t put one minute of time in to being a council member besides coming to meetings. And before we censured him for missing meetings, he barely did that.
It’s wild. I have no idea what his plan is. I don’t even know why he lives in a city instead of a township. But he seems very pleased with himself.
Again, as @DesertDog mentioned a few posts ago, it was more that the Mises Caucus took over and rebranded the party as MAGA supporters, and drove the train to a parallel track with Trump. Most (not all) of the Libertarians who weren’t all “fuck you, I’ve got mine”, especially people in the left-leaning side, or on the extreme civil liberties side pretty much went silent, left the party, stopped voting, or continued (like me) voting for Democrats anyway.
Does he ever talk to anyone there about anything? It doesn’t have to be anything government-related; it could just be small talk about sports, TV, weekend plans, family, weather, etc.
As for his plan, a resolute libertarian like him will not do anything that can be seen as aiding and abetting the function of government. That means he’s not going to do anything except vote “no.” He’s obviously just there for theater. Does he even meet with his constituents to find out what’s going on in this district?
We do try to engage him. He has a college football team he’s passionate about so some of the guys talk about that with him. His wife just had their second kid this week so I asked him about that, and we’ve been inquiring about her for a while.
Not that I’m aware. Thankfully for the city we’re all at large so everyone can come to the other 4 members with issues. The rest of us are out and about at events, volunteering, etc. We’ve never seen him appear at anything in 6 years.
exactly.
I agree with much of what has been posted earlier. I believe it is a combination of factors:
The need to avoid feeling responsible for what a person you voted for does in office. If you never vote for someone with a chance of winning, you can always be pissed off over anything the government does.
Belief in bothsidesism. They’ll say “both sides are exactly the same”, although one side is actively trying to destroy democracy and the other wants to govern responsibly. Libertarians cannot see that.
Belief that every tax makes Baby Jesus cry. This comes from the “I got mine, fuck you” mentality that libertarians have in common with MAGA.
Naive belief that the free market will take care of all things that the government currently does. Eliminate government funding of roads and private enterprise will turn them all into toll roads. Eliminate USDA meat inspectors and private inspection companies will spring up and earn the peoples’ trust in their work.
Like MAGA, libertarians have no idea how government actually works. They simply think that everything government does is by definition evil and that nobody is auditing the books. I worked in state government for 40 years and for the last 20 when I was in a position to know, my particular section was audited at least eight times- sometimes by internal department auditors, sometimes by a different state department, sometimes by federal auditors. In my experience, they were always professional and thorough and while they never found anything untoward, they made recommendations for improvements which were adopted. Libertarians and MAGA think tax collections go into a Scrooge McDuck vault where the politicians can help themselves at will.
Total ignorance of history. If libertarianism is so wonderful, surely some nation would have tried it. Apart from some ancient Greek city states and some Swiss localities, they haven’t and never will. It is an intellectually and morally bankrupt philosophy.
A smug but undeserved feeling of intellectual superiority over the hoi polloi that votes for the two major parties.
A need to feel special and different from everyone else.
Also, American libertarianism has been deeply connected to white nationalism since the beginning, both in its motives and its logic.
In 1959, the fire-breathing libertarian theorists at UVA thrust themselves into the heart of Virginia’s desegregation battle by proposing a now-familiar libertarian ploy: privatization of the state’s public schools. The proposal elevated racial discrimination into a neutral-sounding quest for economic efficiency. The market would see to inequalities via the logic of parent choice; it was simply a matter of “letting the chips fall where they may.”
This was unalloyed bullshit, of course. Given the generations-old imbalance of wealth and power between the races, any laissez-faire approach to compliance with Brown would inevitably reinforce racial inequalities. The state assembly eventually voted down the radical plan, but as MacLean notes, the underlying logic has since burrowed into nearly every facet of our madly privatizing public life — from the Flint water crisis to the attacks on Wisconsin’s public unions — in “a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and local level, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.”
Libertarians talk big about freedom, but “free competition” in an unfair society just means that those who already have an advantage will get a bigger one.
So it’s not surprising that a movement full of stealth white nationalists would largely defect to a more politically successful movement of open white nationalism like MAGA when they could.
That makes sense (it matches my experience of the timeline of mass transition from libertarian to MAGA) but still if the movement’s members had really believed all that stuff about liberty, the constitution and fighting tyranny, that would not have been possible
Yeah that’s the key point. The libertarian movement was not a political movement concerned with personal freedom that unfortunately had a white nationalist minority. It was white nationalist movement that used all the talk of personal freedom as a fig leaf because it was not, at the time, socially acceptable to just come out and say you were a white Nationalist. When Trump made that no longer socially unacceptable, then the whole movement just dropped the fig leaf and transitioned en masse to being plain old white nationalists.
This and previous comments about the “libertarian movement” may not be applicable to what the OP is interested in, the Libertarian Party. Anyone can call themselves, or be called, a small-l libertarian. The Libertarian Party is a recognized political entity in many states, and none of these things were true of the party or active party members that I knew when I was active at the state level in the 70s. If there had been any of that, I would have dissociated myself immediately.
As I said in my previous post, I haven’t been active in over 45 years, and I don’t know how the political party itself has changed in the meantime.
Correct. I am interested in the official Libertarian Party itself.
Minor disagreement. The Libertarian party had a widely mixed base, but agree that a large number were white, educated, on the wealthier (but not rich) side entitled individuals. That group often includes a lot of unthinking racism, especially the “by the bootstraps” group.
At the same time, there were more (than the modern iteration) crusty ex-hippie thing and demanding legalization of any/all drugs, a few “log-cabin” style LGBQT+ but otherwise Republican supports, and a few of us (see my comment upthread) leftist/social freedom types. While I was never a big “believer” in the Libertarian philosophy (better to say I am an American-style “leftist” who thinks much of the Democratic populists aren’t being honest about the need for real tax change to pay for what they and I seem to want), to me the rot crept in during the Obama years.
Lots of the “I’ve got mine!” class looked at what Obama was saying and tried to do and took a hard turn rightward. Which meant over the next 8 years, most of the other types of Libertarians drifted away or were flat out shoved out the door and are now various flavors of Democrats, independents, or just gave up on it all as “unappreciated idealists”.
The Mise Caucus was just the final internal coup that saw their chance and finished the takeover. They think they can get what most of them want (less oversight, less taxes, and yes, ending any sort of talk of responsibility of inequality of even opportunity to others) by riding along with Trump. And it’s most worked in that limited sense.
In an era of thin margins, I think they see themselves as an important wedge and ally that MAGA should respect, though I think they’re greatly wrong about that.
Again, in the admittedly fairly small group of people who were active in my state’s party in the 70s, I never saw anything I interpreted as entitlement or unthinking racism. On the other hand, most of us were probably not as progressive in racial matters as people might like to see in such areas as financial reparations and reparative behaviors, areas that would require heavy government involvement. I think we supposed, no doubt naively, that once productivity was recognized as of high value and therefore so rewarded, productive persons would be rewarded regardless of race or other irrelevant factors, and that companies that wouldn’t hire such productive people for such irrelevant factors would suffer in the marketplace and even go out of business. Of course, the idea that all persons should be treated equally before the law was taken for granted as true and absolute.
This is what I remember, anyway, from more than 45 years ago.
I don’t doubt your memories. Note that your time in the party predated almost my entire lifetime as a 51 year old. I strongly suspect the 80s “Greed is Good” mentality may well have been the the metastasis point. And again, Obama being elected the mortal wound, with Mises and Trump 1.0 being the finishing blow where the remaining “traditional” leadership being ousted.
But of course my perception is going to be biased in terms of the era I formed my political identity.
I must have led a charmed life, I knew not a single person who thought that the election of Obama was the end of freedom and prosperity, or an insult to them personally. Here’s plus one for my little bubble of the world, long may it wave.
There were a whole bunch of people in my social and professional circle who went from middle of the road to committed Republicans during the first few months of Obama’s presidency. They were all white males, 40-60, mostly union members. Until 2008, I hardly knew a union member who openly supported the Republicans.
The 2009 inauguration watch party in our cafeteria was eye opening. The group that gathered was almost entirely women and/or people of color. This is a workplace that was majority white male. Lots of muttering on the shop floor about why the election was illegitimate and Obama was a Manchurian candidate and not a natural born citizen.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with him being black.
My wide associations included a number of quite reactionary types. And yeah, upset quite a lot of “progressive” Republican types who were quite happy as long as people of color were 80’s/90’s Cosby types that were apparently fully assimilated and wanted all the same things they wanted, or appeared too.
An African American President with a foreign name? Wanting unified health care? And the talk (not from Obama directly) of reparations or even acknowledgement of the harms of slavery? A number of them swung Right very hard. Not just Libertarians, but plenty of Republicans as well.
Which is a part of how I drifted away from any claims I had from being a centrist (I am about raising taxes and cutting costs to at least start reducing the debt) into a registered Libertarian who votes a straight D ticket 99% of the time.
At the time of Obama’s inauguration my workplace, the advertising department in a San Francisco newspaper, was heavily female/minority, and there just weren’t that many straight white males left. There might have been a disgruntled few, but if so they kept it to themselves. That was pretty much my bubble at the time, not having much outside social contact.